A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
querencia
A beautiful and broadly applied term that can mean an animal’s den or lair. Querencia is the place a creature returns to and defends, and it’s used specifically in bullfighting to describe the spot a bull adopts, standing in it, refusing to leave, and fighting harder there than anywhere else. In wider Spanish use, it means the place you are drawn back to and where you feel most at home, whether or not you were born in it, as well as homesickness or nostalgia.
Etymology
The word is Spanish, built on the verb meaning to want or to love, so it is, roughly, the place of wanting. Behind that is a Latin verb meaning to seek or to ask, which is also the source of English query, quest, require, inquest, and conquer.
Notes
Hemingway wrote about the bullfighting usage in Death in the Afternoon and it entered English through him. It reached nature writing separately, used for the specific piece of country a person is bound to.